It was in the same dwelling that the celebrated bronze statuette of the Dancing Faun was found.  It has its head and arms uplifted, its shoulders thrown back, its breast projecting, every muscle in motion, the whole body dancing.  An accompanying piece, however, was lacking to this little deity so full of spring and vigor, and that piece has been exhumed by recent excavations, in quite an humble tenement.  It represents a delicate youth, full of nonchalance and grace, a Narcissus hearkening to the musical echo in the distance.  His head leans over, his ear is stretched to listen, his finger is turned in the direction whence he hears the sound—­his whole body listens.  Placed near each other in the museum, these two bronzes would make Pagans of us were religion but an affair of art.[I]

Then the mere wine-merchants of a little ancient city adorned their fountains with treasures like these!  Others have been found, less precious, perhaps, but charming, nevertheless; the fisherman in sitting posture at the small mosaic fountain; the group representing Hercules holding a stag bent over his knee; a diminutive Apollo leaning, lyre in hand, against a pillar; an aged Silenus carrying a goat-skin of wine; a pretty Venus arranging her moistened tresses; a hunting Diana, etc.; without counting the Hermes and the double busts, one among the rest comprising the two heads of a male and female Faun full of intemperance and coarse gayety.  ’Tis true that everything is not perfect in these sculptures, particularly in the marbles.  The statues of Livia, of Drusus, and of Eumachia, are but moderately good; those discovered in the temples, such as Isis, Bacchus, Venus, etc., have not come down from the Parthenon.  The decline of taste makes itself apparent in the latest ornamentation of the tombs and edifices, and the decorative work of the houses, the marble embellishments; and, above all, those executed in stucco become overladen and tawdry, heavy and labored, toward the last.  Nevertheless, they reveal, if not a great aesthetic feeling, at least that yearning for elegance which entered so profoundly into the manners of the ancients.  With us, in fine, art is never anything but a superfluity—­something unfamiliar and foreign that comes in to us from the outside when we are wealthy.  Our paintings and our sculptures do not make part and parcel of our houses.  If we have a Venus of Milo on our mantel-clock, it is not because we worship beauty, nor that, to our view, there is the slightest connection between the mother of the Graces and the hour of the day.  Venus finds herself very much out of her element there; she is in exile, evidently.  On the other hand, at Pompeii she is at home, as Saint Genevieve once was at Paris, as Saint Januarius still is at Naples.  She was the venerated patroness whose protection they invoked, whose anger they feared.  “May the wrath of the angry Pompeian Venus fall upon him!” was their form of imprecation.  All these well-known